With the widespread impact of the covid-19 virus, it is not surprising that some directors began exploring the subjective impact of the regulations through the medium of film. Mayu Nakamura’s She Is Me, I Am Her (2022), for example, delivered an incredible exploration of life under the pandemic.

The sudden societal shifts caused by the desire to curb the spread of the virus, in fact, provide a fertile narrative frame for the director to question the logic of the subject and his relationship with the O/other. Rikako Watanabe is the latest director to utilize this frame to question the relationships between the subject and his desire.

Her narrative opens when a woman called Sae (Chie Sakamoto) starts working at a local cafe. Yet, while she seems at peace, the news of an actor who possibly committed suicide and a confusing encounter at the cafe makes her repressed painful past burst through the surface of her ego.

With Suton, Watanabe offers an elegant character study that traces out how the societal response to the pandemic – i.e. the many regulations and restrictions to curb the spread of the virus among the population – disturbs the mental equilibrium of subjects. For Sae, the sudden cancellation of the play in which stars radically short-circuits her dream to become an actress. The libido invested in the upcoming play and her long cherished dream deflates, by weakening the link between her and the Other, causing her to promptly slip into a state of depression (Psycho-note 1).  

Yet, Watanabe’s narrative is not only about failing self-worth, but how, by going through a depressive phase, one can find the opportunity to free oneself of one’s self-intoxicating fantasies and establish a position from which it is easier to vocalize a sliver of one’s subjectivity to an Other. Moreover, she underlines the necessity of the superficial interactions to create a feeling of interpersonal connection and a sense of societal harmony and illustrates the ability of a single signifier to fleetingly please the subject’s desire for recognition and spark one’s nearly doused flame of desire.

To bring the Sae’s story visually to life, Watanabe utilizes static moments and fluid and shaky documentary-like dynamism. Yet, while the way Watanabe concatenates his shots is quite straight-forward, he elevates his composition with his long takes that, by emphasizing a certain subjective and societal stillness, offer the spectator a poetic still-life portrait of the mundane (Music-note 1).

Yet, the fact that the atmospheric stillness is not shattered when crude documentary-like and fluid dynamism appears within the visual fabric underlines the stillness is not, in essence, visual in nature, but auditive. It is, in other words, the sensible presence of silence that emphasizes the stillness of the subject and the peaceful harmony at the societal surface.  The few musical pieces that decorate Watanabe’s composition further emphasize the self-deceptive sense of peacefulness by which the subject wanders through the societal field.  

As silence is important to evoke a certain deceptive peace, it is not surprising that Watanabe manipulates sound the auditive dimension to highlight the impact of the signifier on the superficial ego, shaking its frail consistency by stirring the subject that resides behind it. Watanabe creates the same effect by suddenly changing the visual pace, ravishing the peaceful flow with flashes of fragmentary flash-backs.

The subtle tremble that often marks the frame comes to echo the destabilizing trembling of the subject by the signifier. In these sequences the presence of silence has a slightly different quality. Rather than echoing the peaceful stillness of the ego, the spatial silence echoes the failure of the subject to vocalize something of her suffering to another subject – while the woman suffers, her suffering remains absent from her signifiers.          

Suton offers the spectator a touching and visually engaging exploration of the way the regulations to curb the spread of the covid-19 virus can negatively impact the subject and how it only takes a signifier to re-animate the subject. Rikako Watanabe’s narrative is a satisfying experience because it succeeds to echo the unvocalized ‘pandemic’ truth of many.

Notes

Psycho-note 1: The flashback sequence reveals that the dream functioned as the imaginary object that allowed the main character to invest (libido) in other people, like her boyfriend. The investment in this dream is, in other words, the intermediary object that binds subject and Other together.

Music-note 1: The minimal dynamism that intrudes in Watanabe’s static long takes does not disturb the atmospheric stillness. It is the sensible presence of silence that supports the stillness that emanates from the frame.